Glad to Be Unhappy: The French Case

Sometimes, even the wrong question can get the right answer. So, at least, it appears from a report in the Guardian about Claudia Senik, a French economist who will present a paper in London next month to show that, despite the generally excellent material conditions of life in France, “the French are gloomy. A recent WIN-Gallup poll found that their expectations for the coming year ranked lower than those in Iraq or Afghanistan.” The Guardian’s Jamie Doward and Hussein Kesvani write: > Senik claims that the “French paradox”—the fact that the country’s general prosperity does not appear to translate into the happiness of its citizens—can be explained by “mental attitudes that are acquired in school or other socialisation instances, especially during youth.”

Senik presented the idea in Le Monde in 2011. The French National Institute of Statistics and Economic Studies found that France had the same “index of human development” (material well-being) as Belgium and Denmark, but polled much lower in the “happiness scale,” which ranged from one to ten: France was 7.2, while Belgium scored 7.7 and Denmark rated 8.3. “The fact of living in France reduces by twenty percent the probability of declaring oneself very happy,” Senik writes, and adds that France has Europe’s highest rate of usage of mood-altering drugs, and one of the highest rates of suicide. Taking into consideration a range of factors, she links the French “malaise” to “the ensemble of psychological and ideological mechanisms and dispositions that constitute the process of the transformation of experiences into well-being”—in other words, French culture. (“French people living abroad are less happy than other Europeans living outside their country of origin,” she writes.)

I haven’t seen the questions in the poll, but it may well be that the French are only less likely to call themselves happy—and what’s unclear is whether the gloomy or skeptical turns of phrase that they use to describe their states of mind correlate to their actual states of mind. It may be the language of happiness that eludes the French rather than the underlying condition. Unhappiness, after all, often implies the desire for change—in circumstances, or even in oneself—and so dissatisfaction with life despite its material benefits suggests a kind of idealism—of intellectual vision of possibilities beyond the actual—that would, at the very least, match up with even the most superficial or stereotypical view of French culture.

Does it seem likely that the more self-consciously intellectual a society is, the likelier is its collective discontent? Germany is certainly a country of impressive learning and cultural achievement. But Germany, having given the world two of the biggest visionary malcontents—one right, the other left—and having endured the burden of efforts to realize those visions, has every reason to keep its eye on the more immediate prize of practical and positivist reconstruction. German idealism in politics may have seen its final days.

French culture rests on three pillars: psychology, critique, and classicism. From Montaigne and Rousseau through Duras and a raft of our contemporaries, French writers have delved into their own experience and character with a singular enthusiasm and self-baring, self-excoriating fervor. Diderot, Baudelaire, Malraux, all artistic luminaries, were also critics of the first order, and France may be the only country to have sparked an artistic revolution, the French New Wave, by means of criticism. And the entire country is, for better and worse, a sort of living museum of the multiple layers of its own creations. Roberto Rossellini’s 1966 film “The Taking of Power of Louis XIV” shows how the monarchy got into the culture business; when it did so, it set the template for centralism and an academic historicism (a transmission from above of the official templates and models of artistic achievement) that endures to this day.

With such a deeply ingrained and sternly imposed cultural education, self-examination entails sociopolitical critique (no surprise that Rousseau was the author of the Confessions and the Reveries as well as of the Social Contract and the Discourses), and art criticism takes an inherently ideological turn. The deep and passionate aestheticism of daily French life is therefore far more than just a visual, auditory, carnal, or culinary expression of joie de vivre; it’s a joie de penser, a joy of thinking that derives pleasure from its displeasure and derives constructive energy from its self-conscious sense of resistance.

The two signal moments of modern French culture, the French New Wave and French literary theory, were constructed from such a push-and-pull of classicism and renunciation, of repudiation and reconstruction. As critics, the Hitchcocko-Hawksians of Cahiers du Cinéma (including François Truffaut, Jean-Luc Godard, and Jacques Rivette) furiously rejected the orthodox history of the French cinema (its “tradition of quality”) as well as France’s own high cultural heritage (Godard has said on several occasions that part of the appeal of the cinema for himself and his friends in the late forties was that it wasn’t part of the culture that they got from their parents and in school). But in their countervailing passion for an altogether different tradition—that of such Hollywood filmmakers as Alfred Hitchcock, Howard Hawks, and Nicholas Ray—they set up the very terms of modern cinephilia, which is a new and even more deeply entrenched classicism. As for theory—take Roland Barthes, a man of consummate education who took seriously wrestling and commercials, all the better to enfold them in a new theoretical edifice borrowed from the new fields of linguistics and anthropology; or Jacques Derrida, who, as Emily Eakin writes in a superb review of a new biography of the philosopher, was an outsider from the start and whose very infiltration and undermining of the premises of Western philosophy gave rise to a new method that reinvigorated and perpetuated it and to an enduring new canon of works that nourished that method.

I wrote recently about the new DVD release of “Chronicle of a Summer,” the 1960 documentary by the French directors Jean Rouch and Edgar Morin that begins with the premise of person-in-the-street interviews in Paris that are launched by the question “Are you happy?” Though the answers take off from the same baseline considerations as Senik’s—work, family, money, prospects—the howling unhappiness that the film uncovers has its roots in politics and history, or, rather, in the repression of politics and history. By means of the film, the French government’s harsh censorship of discussion of the Algerian War and related issues (such as the French Army’s use of torture and French agents’ extrajudicial assassinations), and the pervasive silence regarding the role of the French government in the German Occupation and in the deportation of French Jews to concentration camps—as well as the silence of survivors regarding the experience—come through as exemplary causes of individuals’ misery.

Rouch and Morin were on to something perhaps even bigger than they anticipated. The dependence of personal fulfillment on media politics became all the more apparent throughout the sixties, as private behavior became ever more flamboyantly uninhibited and centrifugal, France’s centralized and conservative communications policies failed to reflect the changes in the air, and the classicizing edifice of the educational system and cultural institutions suddenly slipped over to the wrong side of the question. Remarkably, “Chronicle of a Summer” foreshadows the events of May ’68: the repudiation of the public-private split, the rejection of public silence regarding intimate concerns, the demand that cultural and political life reflect the lives and thoughts of French people—including (and even especially) of young French people. But French culture and French habits are resilient, and the exuberant sense of infinite new possibilities soon yielded new orthodoxies: the apparent counterculture soon became a new classicism—as well as a new source of self-renewing, self-critical, self-affirming unhappiness, of joie de malheur.

I would speculate that this perpetually inward-looking skepticism was even what spared France the brunt of leftist terrorism that was the scourge of Germany and Italy in the seventies. (It’s awful to imagine, however, that the high suicide rate may be the terribly high price.) Rhetorical pessimism in the face of a perhaps unparalleled atmosphere of aesthetic sophistication and dialectical nuance may be precisely that heady society’s most remarkable and distinctive product (and anyone who has spent much time in France should be able to attest to its inexhaustible wealth of incisive conversation)—but it may also have turned France into the cultural equivalent of a petro-economy, in which the production of discourse and its permanent rumblings and grumblings diverts energy and attention from all other forms of creation. Much of the best modern French art, whether literary or cinematic, channels that discourse into artistic form. Those who find French movies “talky” miss the point; it’s like complaining about dust in Westerns or violence in war movies. Whatever measures Senik might imagine to raise the French quotient of affirmed happiness might come at the price of irrelevance.

P.S. In debates here over teacher evaluation and the testing of student skills, what has been lost is the question of the very substance of education. I have long thought that there is a quiet conspiracy at work to reduce education to training—to generate students who have the skills to get a job rather than the historical perspective or theoretical detachment to criticize authority. It’s a commonplace that knowledge is power, and the emptying-out of classroom substance in favor of abstract and deployable abilities is a terrifyingly surreptitious way of shifting the balance away from the individual. The rumblings from France may be just what the utilitarian faction has in mind to avoid.